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This week’s podcast continues our three month-long discussion of Hamlet with with a look at Ophelia, botanicals, abortion, and suicide (possibly even assisted)…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
[archive]
This week’s podcast continues our three month-long discussion of Hamlet with with a look at Ophelia, botanicals, abortion, and suicide (possibly even assisted)…
With every play, just as I like to take a look at the stage directions hidden in the dialogue, I think it’s also a good idea to take a look at how verse can give an actor some performance clues. And so we go with Hamlet.
Continue reading “Scansion for Clues: Hitting Pause on Hamlet”
As we’ve discussed before (for some of you, ad nauseum), there’s not a whole lot of stage direction in Shakespeare (though seemingly more here in Hamlet than in the other plays we’ve read thus far). So the director and the actor have to depend upon the dialogue and speeches themselves for guidance.
A while back, I discussed the debate about Hamlet’s madness “so call it” (II.ii.5), and came out fully on the side of non-madness. Well, I’m back. But unlike many of my re-examinations, I don’t find myself in any kind of “walk-back.” Rather, now I’m more convinced than ever that the boy jus’ ain’t cray cray.
Why?
Continue reading ““Play”ing with Hamlet: a concordance view”
Yesterday, I talked a little about the aftermath of Ophelia’s “mad” scene in Act Four, Scene Five of Hamlet: the account of her death, delivered by Gertrude, two scenes later in Act Four, Scene Seven. I proposed that Ophelia took her life, desperate because of an unplanned pregnancy and the ineffectiveness of her chemical abortion, both lying on top of the foundation of her father’s death and her lover’s forced departure. I also noted that because of the specificity of Gertrude’s account, I feel that she must have been a first-hand witness to the act.
But I’m troubled.
Continue reading “Hamlet: Suicidal Tendencies and Questions”
For the last few non-podcast-related blog entries, I’ve been discussing Ophelia and her flowers in Hamlet, first their symbolism and then their more practical, medicinal uses. I even raised the possibility of Ophelia being pregnant and that rosemary and rue could have been used for a chemically induced abortion.
Let’s take this interpretation out to its (seeming) logical conclusion…
Continue reading “Hamlet: Ophelia and her Flowers–Aftermath”
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This week’s podcast continues our three month-long discussion of Hamlet with an interview with Amir Khan, who has written a book, Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy, due out later this year from Edinburgh University Press. A chapter of that book has been printed in the current issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, under the title “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.”
Yesterday, we took a look at the purely symbolic meanings of the flowers Ophelia hands out in her final appearance in Hamlet, and I mentioned possible recipients for each flower (as there are no stage directions). At the end of the post, though, I alluded there may be an alternate way to determine possible recipients.
What if there were other meanings to the flowers, not symbolic but rather medicinal?
All of the flowers have some effect on the body:
When we last see Ophelia in Hamlet, in Act Four, Scene Five, she enters distract, singing snatches of songs, then–if her dialogue is any clue–handing out flowers.
If T.S. Eliot performed a beat-down on Hamlet, then Harold Bloom gives it a loving massage with a happy ending.